14 DAY TRIAL // Even though its has released to manufacturing Windows Server 2008 on February 4, 2008, alongside Windows Vista SP1, and was launched on February 27, Microsoft is still wrapping up the latest Windows server operating system. In this context, the Redmond company announced that Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V was released to manufacturing today, June 26, 2008. In excess of 1.5 million Beta copies of hypervisor-based virtualization technology which is whipped as a default component of Windows Server 2008 have already been downloaded and implemented into testing environments.
With the RTM of Hyper-V, Microsoft is now able to take its vision of democratizing virtualization to the next level, namely production environments. "Customers who buy Windows Server 2008 are not only getting the scalability benefits, the high performance and reliability, and all the great things that Windows Server is known for; as of today they can benefit from integrated virtualization with Hyper-V," explained Bill Hilf, general manager of Windows Server Marketing and Platform Strategy at Microsoft.
The Redmond giant revealed that it accounted for over 250 customers which jumped at the chance to be early adopters of the Windows Server 2008 hypervisor. One of the benefits that Microsoft offers with Windows Server Hyper-V over Linux virtualization solution involves management tools complete with centralization capabilities.
And since dogfooding is a tradition at Microsoft, the company has already integrated Hyper-V into its production environment since the hypervisor was still into Release Candidate stage. MSDN and TechNet are already running on virtualized servers and Microsoft.com is next in line. According to the company, Microsoft.com, with over 38 million page views per day will be over 50% virtualized by the end of this month.
"There have already been over 1 million evaluations of Hyper-V, and with this release IT organizations everywhere can move it from the lab to production to fully experience the benefits that Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 can bring," Hilf added. He added that customers can also use System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, now in beta, to help them best configure and deploy their hypervisor-based environments.